oil + water …

British Petroleum’s catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is the largest in American history, and as of this writing the crisis continues. To date, every two to three days the ruptured BP oil well spews out the same amount of oil as the entire Alaskan Exxon Valdez oil spill.

By way of preface to a portal onto recent Buddhist response to the catastrophe ————— here’s a quote from scholar activist Joanna Macy, in conversation with John Seed, director of the Rainforest Information Center in Australia :

One day we were walking through the rainforest in New South Wales, where he has his office, and I asked him, “You talk about the struggle against the lumber interests and politicians to save the remaining rainforest in Australia. How do you deal with the despair?” He replied, “I try to remember that it’s not me, John Seed, trying to protect the rainforest. Rather I’m part of the rainforest protecting myself. I am that part of the rainforest recently emerged into human thinking.”

[from The Greening of the Self by Joanna Macy, fromWorld as Lover World as Self, 1991
Parallax Press, Berkeley. ISBN 0-938077-27-9 (also collected in Dharma Gaia, Ed. Allan Hunt Badiner. With thanks to Steve Silberman, & Emily Hoyer, denizens of the Buddhist conference at The Well (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link) for pointing this out. ]

On May 27, Marketing Director, Strategist, Producer, Writer, Critic, and Activist Josh Schrei posted an open letter to the CEO of BP, Buddhist Ethics for a Harm-Free Livelihood, in Huffington Post. [“Livelihood” is one of the components of the Eight-Fold Path. It might be summed up: “Do no harm.”] . Beginning with a pair of quotes from Thich Nhat Hanh, and the film Iron Man, his epistle has garnered over 200 comments.

Because self and others can only be understood in terms of relationship, we see that self-interest and others’ interest are closely interrelated and there is no self-interest completely unrelated to others’ interests. Due to the fundamental interconnectedness which lies at the heart of reality, your interest is also my interest: in a deep sense, “my” interest and “your” interest basically converge.